Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Love is one of the oldest theme of poetry. In fact, poetry is traditionally considered as an expression of love. This is the reason why writing love poetry is one of the most difficult challenge for a poet today. It is so easy to slip into a cliche or be sentimental in your treatment.

Yet there is no denying the fact that some of the greatest poetry in the world is love poetry: Lorca, Neruda, Paz, Meerabai, Kabir and of course Ghalib.

I believe Meera composed the finest love poetry in the world. Why? Because most of the others mentioned above were unable to transcend their masculine consciousness. Masculine love poetry is always tinged with the violence of lust and certain roughness which reduces the beloved to an object of sexual desire. Meera wrote magnificient love poetry without attempting to write like men. and thats what gives her poetry certain delicate elusive beauty which the male poets lack.

Friday, February 10, 2006

Ghalib and Metaphysical poets? A friend suggested that there is a connection or similarity between these two poetries. Perhaps he implied that there is a shared ground between the Urdu ghazal tradition and the Metaphysical style. I dont think there is much of similarity between the two. The Metaphysical poets were avant-garde of the times, trying to reinvent the language of poetry to suit intellectual and cultural pressures of the times. Ghalib's poetry is stylistically far more conservative as he does not inflict violence to the language using far fetched and outrageous metaphors or `conceits'. The eternal and universal themes of love, death, and god can be found in any two tradition. Sher in Urdu ghazals come closer to the witty neoclassical couplets of Pope or Dryden which aspire to express `what oft was thought, but n'er so well expressed'. Besides, the religious poetry of Herbert and Crashaw is hardly as profound and dark as that of Ghalib. Existential agony, dark vision and unsettling expression of suffering that we find in Ghalib is far removed from the smart ingeniousness and cleverness of Donne and Marvell. I personally feel that Ghalib is far greater poet than the Metaphysicals.

Teaching Metaphysical poets to MA part one students these days. It made me think on how a mode of writing which was considerd marginal and freakish for hundreds of years, suddenly became an object of admiration and a model in the twentieth century.

My own poetry resembles metaphysical mode in many ways. I have written on the things like spam and corrupt floppy and cyber porn and even `alu vadi' ( paatra in Gujarati) an Indian recipe. These guys used all the learning and scholarship to do violence to the language of poetry and even then their expression of love, devotion, death remains remarkably precise. What is remarkable is that their imagery sounds far fetched and their poetic logic seem to carry things too far, even after extreme avant garde movements like Surrrealism and Dadaism. I think thats what makes them so very interesting.

The Metaphysical mode is the avant-garde of the seventeenth century because it aims to include and absorb everything thats considered `unpoetic' into the language of poetry and inflict great violence on it to express its meaning. Perhaps this is the reason why Sachin is so terribly interested in them even today at the turn of the twentifirst century and understand why Eliot was so excited about them almost a hundred years back.

Thursday, February 2, 2006

If it does not come as a leaf on the tree, it better not come at all. But if it can come as an idle tear to the music of heart breaking, then nothing better.

When I read what Camus had written about love in his Sisyphus, I could not understand it . He had written that love heightens the sense of the Absurdity. Today it is clear to me. Tears increase clarity of eyes. You see things properly. Good vision after all is mandatory for good poetry.

Realization. Poetry is a form of realization. And realization is a product of disillusionment. Moksha. Moksha is the ultimate realization. When you realize that nothing really belongs to you it is then you are extinguished like a candle in the wind. You become silent like a cracked bell abandoned in some deserted temple. Nibbana.

Wednesday, February 1, 2006

One of my teachers whom I hold in high esteem once said that he was now no longer interested in the literary approach which analyzes `language of literature or poetry' but he is interested in the `man-behind-the-work'. I disagreed. I felt that this belief is rooted in medieval bhakti notion of the poet as a saint and this attitude meant `saint-mongering' of some form. I felt that it is the special use of language that is important in poetry.

Today I feel both of us are wrong. The poet IS the Work and the Poem IS the poet. If the poem sounds dishonest and superficial, the poet must be the same too.

My poem IS Sachin. The mythical, surreal world on my poems is the world I inhabit: the world I discover, reveal through my writing, in a way.

I used to believe that the poems are not `expressions' of the self but `inventions'.But today I feel that my poem IS my self itself

Today a friend said that if you get a job at MS, you must admit that there is still some room for merit in this world and your poems will get less morbid.

Well, Sachin's poems are Morbid andSordid and cant help it.

I am too disillusioned about things to believe that getting a job or being a father or being loved is going to cure me of my suffering and pain.

Why is my poetry so `morbid' and `sordid'? I dont know. My poetics, my shastra of kavya is built on my vision of the world which is sordid and morbid and all that. So I try to incorporate as much `unpoetic' and `unaesthetic' elements as possible into the grammar of poetry. The grammar of poetry, for me, is that it is a language of symbols and images. It is a `second degree' language, language within the language, a dialect without the region, an idiolect without the speaker.

But I am NOT believer in the idea of `Pure Poetry' in the Symbolist fashion because I dont like the idea of Purity at all. I am great beliver in the essential Impurity of things.

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Sachin C. Ketkar (b. 1972) is a bilingual writer,
translator, editor, blogger and researcher based in Baroda, Gujarat. His recent
publication is a collection of Marathi critical articles on contemporary
Marathi Poetry, globalization and translation studies titled Changlya Kavitevarchi Statutory Warning:
Samkaleen Marathi Kavita, Jagatikikarn ani Bhashantar (2016). His Marathi
collections of poems are Jarasandhachya
Blogvarche Kahi Ansh (2010) and Bhintishivaicya Khidkitun Dokavtana, (2004). His poetry in English
include Skin, Spam and Other Fake
Encounters: Selected Marathi Poems in translation, (2011), and A Dirge for the Dead Dog and Other
Incantations (2003). Several of his writings on translation are published
as (Trans) Migrating Words: Refractions
on Indian Translation Studies (2010).

He has extensively translated from Marathi and
Gujarati.Most of his translations of
contemporary Marathi poetry are collected in the anthology Live Update: An Anthology of Recent Marathi Poetry (2005) edited by
him. Along with numerous recent Gujarati writers, he has rendered the fifteenth
century Gujarati poet Narsinh Mehta into English for his doctoral research. He
has also translated the work of the well-known contemporary Gujarati writers
like Manilal Desai, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Bhupen Khakkar, Jayant Khatri, Mangal
Rathod, Jaydev Shukla, Rajesh Pandya, Rajendra Patel, Nazir Mansuri, Ajay
Sarvaiya and Mona Patrawala. He has also translated poems of Ted Hughes and
fiction by Jorge Luis Borges and Adam Thopre’s into Marathi. He won ‘Indian
Literature Poetry Translation Prize’, awarded by Indian Literature Journal,
Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi in 2000.

He holds a doctorate from VN South Gujarat
University, Surat and works as Professor in English, Faculty of Arts, The
Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara. He is also Coordinator of
the department research project under UGC SAP DRS II on “Representing the
Region: Literary Discourses, Social Movements and Cultural Forms in Western
India, 1960-2000.